Crystal Palace badge history: an eagle, a palace and a disputed date

The Crystal Palace badge tells you three things at once: the club's nickname, the building it is named after and the year it believes it began. The eagle and the palace have been on the crest together since 2013. The year changed in 2022, and that small edit opened one of the more interesting arguments in football history.

The eagle: how Palace became the Eagles

The eagle has been the club's central symbol since the 1970s, when the Eagles nickname took hold at Selhurst Park. A bird of prey suits a club that has spent much of its life fighting its way up from the lower divisions and back again.

The early eagle badges belong to an era that badge collectors love. Several dates are attached to them, but they come from logo websites rather than the club, so they are left out of the timeline below. What is certain is that the bird stuck, and every Crystal Palace crest since has been built around it.

A glass palace on the badge

The building on the crest is the Crystal Palace, the huge glass and iron hall built for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park and then moved to Sydenham Hill in south London. It burned down in 1936, so the club carries the image of a building nobody under ninety has seen.

The club describes the badge as bearing "the image of its birthplace". That is the heart of the matter: a football team grew up in the grounds of the palace, and the modern club takes its name, its identity and, since 2022, its date from that connection.

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2013: a new Crystal Palace crest chosen with fans

On 7 May 2013 the club unveiled a new crest at its end-of-season awards. Supporters had voted on six designs beforehand, and the result combined the eagle, the glass palace and the year 1905, the founding date of the professional club. It was the first rebrand since 1994.

The timing was good. Palace won promotion to the Premier League that month, beating Watford in the play-off final at Wembley, so the new crest arrived with the club heading back to the top flight.

Not everyone agrees on how the final design was chosen. Some supporters maintain the crest that appeared was not quite the one that won the vote, and the name of the designer is also disputed.

1905 or 1861? The date on the old and new crest

On 18 June 2022 Crystal Palace announced a change to the badge. Only the date moved, from 1905 to 1861, and the club stated plainly that the rest of the crest would remain unchanged. The new version debuted on the 2022/23 Macron kits, and signage around the ground was replaced over the following year or so.

The reason was research by club historian Peter Manning, who identified 1861 as the year cricketers of the Crystal Palace Club set up the original football team. That would put the roots of Palace before those of Notts County, founded in 1862 and usually called the oldest Football League club.

Not all historians accept it. Critics argue that the 1861 side and the professional club formed in 1905 are separate organisations with a shared name and location, rather than one continuous club. The debate is still going, and it gives the old crest and the new one a significance out of all proportion to a four-digit number.

Rumours of a further change in 2026/27, including a retro round badge on the shirt, have circulated among supporters but nothing official has been announced.

Palace among their neighbours

The fiercest rivalry for Palace supporters is with Brighton, whose seagull arrived on their crest in the late 1970s; the Brighton badge page covers their crest. Closer to home, the Fulham badge and the West Ham badge show two more London clubs wrestling with heritage and modern design.

Palace were in the Championship in 2011 and so missed the original Premier League badge survey, but the evolution of Premier League club badges from Arsenal to Manchester United sets out the wider pattern, and every club history is collected under football badges. For a Palace moment of a different kind, see the other goal.

The palace has been gone for ninety years. On the shirt, it is still standing.